"When I think about it, I think we were a lost people," Josephine Edmund said. "I got a sense that people didn’t know what to do."

Toomey's series won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, but Alaska Natives were left wondering, "Is there anything good among us?"

Many approached CANHR’s director, Gerald Mohatt, a longtime rural Alaska teacher and UAF psychology professor and administrator, with their concerns.

"What about the sober people?" they said. "Many of us don't drink or have learned to recover."

Those stories weren't being told, Mohatt noted at the time, especially among alcohol abuse researchers.

"I felt shocked that the field was so insensitive to the perspectives of tribal people who had suffered so much from alcohol abuse," he said. What seemed to be lacking, he said, was the understanding that the data was made up of people's lives, not impersonal facts, and that conclusions drawn from the data sets almost inevitably turn into conclusions about the very people and communities making up the data set.

With the blessing of Alaska Native leaders, Mohatt, Allen, UAF professor Kelly Hazel, along with Alaska Native partners and a staff of Alaska Native and non-Natives, sought those stories, calling the project "People Awakening." With funding from the National Institutes of Health's National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities, the group gathered 101 life histories of sober Alaska Natives. The project took four years to complete.

The group found the stories had apparent themes, which Mohatt calls protective factors.

In 2006 Mohatt and Allen, under CANHR's banner, took the People Awakening research further with pilot projects in Alakanuk and another Southwestern Alaska community. This time they wanted to see if protective factors could be taught.

Using a principle called community-based participatory research, the communities were given control of the program as long as they included the protective factors. Out of 36 prevention activities, Alakanuk developed 20 of them, which are featured in Qungasvik, a prevention manual CANHR is testing.

But that first winter of study, the ravaging spirit took two more lives. The community had no choice but to face it.

The community's elders and university research staff realized something had to be done to help the hurting survivors. So they met and came up with a plan.

Muskoxen circle their young to protect them, said an elder man. "We should do this for our young," he suggested. The group agreed.

One elder remembered an old Yup'ik story about how the ancestors dealt with the spirit of death that would not leave their community.

The spirit was very evil and became stronger and bolder every time a death happened, he explained. It almost seemed like it was arrogant and needed to be brought down.

The ancient people gathered and made a plan. They would shame the spirit into leaving by using a ritual. They would gather in a circle and stomp and grind their feet like they were rubbing out the spirit. And they would laugh as loud as they could while stomping.

The people did this for so long that the bold spirit felt weak and shamed for what it did. It left and did not return, the elder said.

We should do this with our people, he said. The research staff agreed and asked him to lead the ritual for the upcoming group meeting.

By taking control the community came to regard the program as their own and not something UAF is doing, said Ray Oney, the tribal administrator for the Native Village of Alakanuk.

"The elders saw a change in the youth," he said. "We all really want to give the kids an identity of being Yup'ik, who they are, where they came from, how they utilized the land and the history of the Yup'iit."

Shelby Edmund, Josephine's husband, saw a change in their family. He had worried about his children, because he knew the devastation a family could suffer. His two brothers had committed suicide, part of Alakanuk's 1986 epidemic.

Elluam Tungiinun seemed to help his family heal, he said. Before Elluam Tungiinun he and his wife were worried about Freddie Edmund, their teenaged son. Neither knew exactly how to help him.

That changed when they attended the program's parenting sessions, where they were given ideas about how to set boundaries and how to listen to their children.

"I have a relationship with my son now," Shelby Edmund said. "My wife, too."

The program saved Freddie Edmund's life in a different way. One spring day he fell through spring ice into freezing water. He panicked but then remembered the ice-safety lesson he heard from the community's elders as part of Elluam Tungiinun.

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